RHIZOME DIGEST: 10.04.02

discussion

Posted Oct. 3 2002 20:00

RHIZOME DIGEST: 10.04.02

RHIZOME DIGEST: October 4, 2002 Content: +editor's note+ 1. Rachel Greene: Net Art Commissions + Community Campaign +announcement+ 2. ISEA: ISEA General Meeting at ISEA2002 3. Anna Kindvall: Electrohype 2002 4. Rainer Warrol: CLICK STREAM ANALYSIS +work+ 5. Jessica Irish: Columbus Day week +comment+ 6. Ken Jordan, Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid: Freeze Frame [Part 1] +feature+ 7. matthew fuller: simon pope- art for networks + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 1. Date: 10.04.02 From: Rachel Greene (rachel@rhizome.org) Subject: Net Art Commissions + Community Campaign Rhizome just launched its 2002 Net Art Commissions at <a rel="nofollow" href="http://rhizome.org/commissions">http://rhizome.org/commissions</a>! Find out about our Commissioning Program there, as well as about this year's premises, alt.interface and Tactical Response. Visit the projects from your CPU, or stop by the New Museum of Contemporary Art's Zenith Media Lounge through November 3, if you're in NYC. e're still plugging away with our annual Community Campaign. If you're loving Digest, Commissions, or other Rhizome resources, please make a contribution at any level. Small donations make a difference, and all donors are recognized for their support: $10 = an email address @rhizome.org; $25 = a Yael Kanarek mousepad; $50 = a Rhizome.org T-shirt (they're really cool – designed by Cary Peppermint), and $250 = a Rhizome.org laptop backpack. We gratefully accept secure online credit card contributions or donations via PayPal at <a rel="nofollow" href="http://rhizome.org/support/?dig10_04">http://rhizome.org/support/?dig10_04</a> . You can also send a check or money order to Rhizome.org, 115 Mercer Street, New York NY 10012. Money orders can be in any currency. Let's make the Rhizome network self-sustaining… + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +ad+ ARTMEDIA VIII CO-SPONSORED BY LEONARDO/OLATS in PARIS http:://www.olats.org From "Aesthetics of Communication" to Net Art November 29th - December 2nd 2002 + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 2. Date: 10.2.02 From: ISEA (aplohman@nbsp.nl) Subject: ISEA General Meeting at ISEA2002 ************************************************* ISEA General Meeting at ISEA2002 in Nagoya, Japan ************************************************* October 31, 2002 2pm - 4pm at Nagoya Harbor Hall, Nagoya, Japan ISEA, the Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts, cordially invites you to its General Meeting at ISEA2002 in Nagoya, Japan. This occasion will bring together ISEA members and non-members who are interested in learning more about current ISEA projects as well as the future development of the organization. Representatives from the ISEA Board and all ISEA committees will be in attendance. Issues to be discussed include an evaluation of ISEA2002, ISEA2004, a call for new Symposium Host Candidates (ISEA2005, ISEA2006), the development of the ISEA web site, and more. If you are interested in participating and contributing your ideas about ISEA and its activities, please join us. Feel free to distribute this announcement among your colleagues and other interested parties. More information about ISEA2002 in Nagoya, Japan is available at <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.isea.jp">http://www.isea.jp</a>. – ISEA, Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts info@isea-web.org <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.isea-web.org">http://www.isea-web.org</a> T: +31 20 6120297 F: +31 20 6182359 + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +ad+ Metamute is now running a specially commissioned article a week. In the last 3 weeks, we've published Ben Watson's in-depth review of The Philistine Controversy, Eugene Thacker's analysis of the state-endorsed biotech 'debate', and James Flint's urbanist reading of Glastonbury and Sonar festivals. This week, Stewart Home's reviews Martin Amis's Koba the Dread <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.metamute.com">http://www.metamute.com</a> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 3. Date: 10.2.02 From: Anna Kindvall (anna.kindvall@electrohype.org) Subject: Electrohype 2002 Electrohype 2002 - October 23 - 27 Malmo, Sweden Exhibition - INTERPLAY October 23 - 27 The exhibition will present a wide range of computer-based art works, created by 16 different Nordic and International artists and artist groups. The exhibition is shown at two different venues Carolinahallen and Malmo Konsthall. Please visit our web site for further presentation of the participating artists. Artists: Laura Beloff/Erich Berger, Thomas Broomé, Andrew C. Bulhak, Helen Evans/Heiko Hansen, Rikard Lundstedt, Lisa Jevbratt, Ellen Røed, Federico Muelas, Morten Schjødt/ Peter Thillemann/Theis Barenkopf Dinesen/Anne Dorthe Christiansen/Oncotype/Subsilo, Paul Smith/Vicky Isley, C. Anders Wallén, Gisle Frøysland, John F. Simon Jr., Marek Walczak/Martin Wattenberg, Victor Vina, Magnus Wassborg The exhibition opens on Wednesday October 23rd and will run to Sunday evening October 27th. Conference - Art and software - software as art October 24 - 25 In connection to the Electrohype 2002 exhibition we are also organizing a two-day conference focusing on questions related to software and art and software as art. The conference will present lectures with a concluding panel consisting of artists and theorists. We will invite artists who write their own software, artists working close to programmers and theorists who closely follow the development in computer based art. The conference will be held in English. Lectures Josephine Bosma, Thomas Broomé, Boredomresearch, Laura Beloff, John F. Simon jr., Andreas Broegger, Martin Howse Please visit our web site for program and registration form for the conference. <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.electrohype.org">http://www.electrohype.org</a> Note: There are a limited number of seats at the conference, we recommend you to make your registration soon. Performance - Artificial Paradises - ap02 Friday October 25 On Friday night, October the 25th, the British artist group will give their performance ap02 at Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art here in Malmo. This will be a full evening event supported by DJ. Frans Gilberg. The event is a co-operation with Starfield Simulation - forum for electronica . This will be a unique opportunity to experience a visual and aural performance where art and technology, code and computers merge into a total experience. You find more information at <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.electrohype.org">http://www.electrohype.org</a> Best regards Electrohype – ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::ELECTROHYPE Ph: +46 40 780 20 Mobil: +46 708 94 57 27 e-mail: anna.kindvall@electrohype.org URL: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.electrohype.org">http://www.electrohype.org</a> If you encounter problems with this mail address please notify me at electrohype@swipnet.se + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 4. Date: 10.3.02 From: Rainer Warrol (aplohman@nbsp.nl) Subject: CLICK STREAM ANALYSIS CLICK STREAM ANALYSIS At the Museo Laboratoria di Arte Contemporanea Università di Roma La Sapienza piazzale Aldo Moro, 5 00185 Rome, Italia 02/10/2002 - 25/10/2002 The exhibition presents 10 fairly wellknown sites of net.art, from Marc Napier's Potatoland; to Vuc Cosic's 'History', Marcello Mazzella's 'Bodydrome', or Akane Asaoka's 'Planetarium'. But the objective is not only to present some representative pieces of net.art to the Roman public, but also to explore new ways of presenting this art in a gallery setting. The exhibition is project prepared in a few months by Luna Gubinelli (for the graphic part) and her brother Mauro (for the programming). Luna is a doctoral student studying Museal Installations. The sites are shown by the means of projectors. Her idea is to present the visitor with a simple and attractive graphical first page, as an entry point to the selected sites, to reconstruct "within the larger world of the net" a more manageable 'museum space' that however remains on the Net and is not a succesion of separate sites on separate computers. Furthermore, the Click Stream Analysis of the title is there to make visible to the visitor his/her actions in this museal setting : the percourse from one site to the other is recorded and can be printed out at the the end of the visit as a graphical diagram of the interactions with the 'exhibits'. This materialisation of a visit to an essentially immaterial world seemed to meet the expectations of the public, if one takes into account the number of people looking satisfied and walking away with their very own diagram at the end of the visit. For the lqst week of the show, Luna intends to present her own piece of computer art, the amalgamated statistics and diagrams of all the visitors. More info (in Italian) on the vision of the curators at <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.luxflux.net/megaz/3/extent.htm">http://www.luxflux.net/megaz/3/extent.htm</a>. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 5. Date: 10.1.02 From: Jessica Irish (jirish@onramparts.net) Subject: Columbus Day week + TROPICAL AMERICA + <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.tropicalamerica.com">http://www.tropicalamerica.com</a> A game about the true histories of the Americas….. Launch: Columbus Day! Debut: Friday, October 11th @ 5pm Race in Digital Space Conference MOCA Auditorium, Los Angeles Inspired by the similarly titled mural by David Alfaro Siqueros- subsequently whitewashed in Los Angeles in 1932- Tropical America explores the causes and effects of the erasure of history. From the battles of Bolivar, to the single-crop economy of Cuba, the myth of El Dorado and the poems of Sor Juana de la Cruz, Tropical America reveals a forgotten terrain, the birthplace of contemporary cross-cultural life. The user¹s quest begins not before a massacre, as it is often the case in first-person shooter games, but rather after a killing occurs. The story of Rufina Amaya, sole survivor of the 1981 massacre of El Mozote in El Salvador, where more that 1,000 people died in the hands of the Atlacatl battalion, becomes the contextual anchor for "Tropical America", and the impetus from which the user will begin their journey. For "Tropical America", El Mozote symbolizes the silencing of one people¹s histories and the perseverance of its survivors to bring the events into the open. info@tropicalamerica.com ——— A project of OnRamp Arts, 2002 OnRamp Arts is a non-profit media arts organization whose mission is to create and produce collaborative, innovative, digital media projects that bridge new technology, the arts and local communities. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - : jessica irish : onramp arts : <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.onramparts.org">http://www.onramparts.org</a> : 213.481.2395 : next project launch: Columbus Day! : TROPICAL AMERICA : <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.tropicalamerica.com">http://www.tropicalamerica.com</a> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 6. Date: 10.1.02 From: Ken Jordan (ken@kenjordan.tv) Subject: Freeze Frame [Part 1] Below is a collaborative essay I wrote with Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid for the "virtual music" issue of New Music Box (<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.newmusicbox.org">http://www.newmusicbox.org</a>) that went live today. Freeze Frame: Audio, Aesthetics, Sampling, and Contemporary Multimedia by Ken Jordan and Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid Paul D. Miller's Preamble: In an era of intensely networked systems, when you create, it's not just how you create, but the context of the activity that makes the product. Let's think of this as a hypothetical situation become real, and then turn the idea inside out and apply it to music - operating systems, editing environments, graphical user interfaces - these are the keywords in this kind of compositional strategy. During most of the spring of 2002 I was working on an album called "Optometry." I thought of it as a record that focused on "the science of sound - as applied to vision." Think of it as a kind of "synaesthesia" project navigating the bandwidth operating between analog and digital realms. "Optometry" was constructed out of a series of audio metaphors about how people could think of jazz as text, of jazz as a precedent for sampling - of jazz as a kind of template for improvisation with memory in the age of the infinite archive. In sum, the album was a play on context versus content in a digital milieu using sampling as a "virtual band" of the hand. Flip the situation into the here and now of a world where file swapping and peer-2-peer bootlegs are the norms of how music flows on the web, and "Optometry" becomes a conceptual art project about how the "hypertextual imagination" holds us all together. Seamless, invisible, hyper-utilitarian… those are some of the words that describe the composition process of "Optometry." What's new here? In 1939 John Cage made a simple statement about a composition made of invisible networks that was called "Imaginary Landscape." The piece was written for phonographs with fixed and variable frequencies (consider that there was no magnetic tape at that time), and radios tuned to random stations. The idea for Cage was that the music was an invisible network based on "chance operations." As Cage would later say in his famous 1957 essay "Experimental Music," "Any sounds may occur in any combination and in any continuity." The sounds of one fixed environment for him were meant to be taken out of context and made to float - think of it as audio free association, and you get the first formalist ideas of the origins of DJ culture. But what does this have to do with jazz? In 1964 Ralph Ellison gave a speech about writing jazz criticism. In it he discussed Henry James's fascination with Americaness - think of it as an echo of the Cage notion, and flip the code into a different cipher - you arrive at Henry James' critique of Americanness as "a complex fate." The Ellison lecture was called "Hidden Name/Complex Fate" and Ellison takes us on a journey through elements "absent from American life." In a speech before the Library of Congress, Ellison would flip the mix and build a template for a new kind of literature - that's the echo of "Imaginary Landscape" that intrigues me. "So long before I thought of writing, I was playing by weather, by speech rhythms, by Negro voices and their different timbres and idioms, by husky male voices and by the high shrill singing voices of certain Negro women, by music by tight places and wide spaces in which the eyes could wander…" Again, the invocation of an imaginary landscape made of the hyper-real experiences of living in a world made of fragments of experience. That's what "Optometry" inherits. Think of it as a dialectical triangulation between the idea of being made from files of expression put through places that are not spaces, but code. Gesture is the generative syntax, but once the sounds leave the body, they're files. And that's the beginning… 1. When computers communicate over a network, they do so through sound. Before information can be sent over wires run between computers, it must first be translated into tones. The composer Luke Dubois, of Columbia University's electronic music department, has described the static you hear when a modem connects as a hyper-accelerated Morse Code, a billion dots and dashes sung each second, too fast for the human ear to discern. This has been true since the dawn of networked computing. When the first two nodes of the Internet, at UCLA and Stamford, were brought online in 1969, Charlie Kline at UCLA famously initiated the connection by typing "login." After keying the letter "l" he received the appropriate echo back along the phone line from Stamford. The same with the letter "o." But when he hit "g" the system crashed; the audible reply from Stamford never reached its destination. In 1972, Ray Tomlinson modified a program meant for ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet, that would let people send each other data as small "letters." He chose the @ sign for addresses for a simple reason: the punctuation keys on his Model 33 Teletype made it easy to type; it was a convenient way to lend a geographic metaphor to an otherwise abstract place made up of data and people's interaction with the nodes that hold the data together. In one fell swoop, Tomlinson signaled that data could be both a place and a linguistic placeholder for digital information as a complete environment. By using the @ symbol, he restated what modernist artists and composers had been pointing out for over a century: when information becomes total media in the Wagnerian and the Nietzschian sense in, we arrive at the "Gesamkunstwerk" or "the total artwork." The Situationists referred to this as a "psycho-geography." Antonin Artaud wrote an essay about it called "Theater and It's Shadow;" for him it was based on the interaction of different forms of alchemy. When Artaud coined the term "virtual reality" in his 1938 essay "The Alchemical Theater," he anticipated a realm where signs, symbols, letters, and ciphers were all placeholders in the rapidly changing landscape of a society that faced the surging tides of industrial culture's mad race to become an information culture. It was a phrase to describe a mind trying to make sense of the data road kill on the side of the information highway being built in the minds of artists whose dreams punctuated an immense run on sentence typed across the face of the planet as technology carried the codes out of their minds and into the world. In the 20th century, one symbol – "@" – ushered in a new world linked by the intent of people to communicate. This is a world of infinitely reflecting fragments, vibrating, manifesting a hum, making music. The connection between sound and networked computing is more than the product of technical convenience. It can be traced to the first visionary articulation of the digital age. In his seminal essay from 1945, "As We May Think," Roosevelt's science advisor, Vannevar Bush, proposed the creation of a device he called the memex, which provided the inspiration for what later became the networked personal computer. Bush's memex system had the ability to synthesize speech from text, and, conversely, to automatically create text records from spoken commands. He wrote enthusiastically of the Voder, which was introduced at the 1939 World's Fair as "the machine that talks." "A girl stroked its keys and it emitted recognizable speech," Bush wrote. "No human vocal cords entered in the procedure at any point; the keys simply combined some electrically produced vibrations and passed these on to a loud-speaker." Bush also discussed another Bell Labs invention, the Vocoder, an early attempt at a voice recognition system. Central to his vision of the memex was the notion that sound would circulate through the system, available for easy retrieval and manipulation. Today that ease of access and malleability is transforming the way musicians conceive of and make music. It is now simple to convert sound into digital streams, so it can flow anywhere across the computer network, to be manipulated by a continually growing array of software. Real time collaborations between musicians across the Net are becoming common. Online collaborations that are not real time are commonplace. The combination of databases (for storage), software (for manipulation), and networks (for interactivity between databases, software, and musicians) is challenging many long held notions of what music making can or should be. Established boundaries are blurring. This blurring comes from a basic premise behind computing: that all information can be translated from its original form into binary code, and then re-articulated in a new form in a different medium. Texts can be stored in a database as ones and zeros, and later output as images or sounds. Ted Nelson, the man who coined the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia" in the mid-1960s, was among the first to appreciate the full range of opportunities that networked computers make possible. In 1974, he proposed the playful idea of "teledildonics," a computer system that would convert audio information into tactile sensations. Why should music only enter the body through the ear? Why not through the skin, or through the eye? Artists have been using computer networks for collaboration at least since 1979, when I.P. Sharp Associates made their timesharing system available to an artist's project called "Interplay." Organizer Bill Bartlett contacted artists in cities around the world where IPSA offices were located, and invited them to participate in an online conference – essentially a "live chat" – on the subject of networking. At the time this technology was rare and expensive; artists had no access to it. "Interplay" is often referred to as the first live, network-based, collaborative art project. Around the same time, the innovative use of satellites by artists such as Nam June Paik, Joseph Beuys, Douglas Davis, Kit Galloway, and Sherrie Rabinowitz were connecting performers across great distances in collaborative, interactive pieces. A dancer in New York would improvise to music played in Paris, while video of the two would be edited into a single performance for broadcast in, say, Berlin. Although these pioneering telematic works did not make use of networked computing – bandwidth and processor speeds were not yet great enough to allow for it – they set precedents for the real time network-based interaction between artists that became possible in the 1990s, as the technology improved and costs came down. Online collaboration today takes many forms. Using Web-based music technologies, artists are working together to create new music. There are online studios that connect artists across great distances, and Web-based jams between musicians who have never laid eyes on one another. At the same time, even more popular are "collaborations" between artists who are not even aware that a "collaboration" is taking place. Referred to as "remixes" or "bootlegs," digital files of a wide range of recorded material are being cut up and manipulated into entirely new works of art – blending distinct and unlikely source materials into singular creations. Of course, this kind of unsolicited collaboration challenges some long-held notions of intellectual property, and an artist's unique affiliation with his or her own output. But at the same time, it brings back the idea of a shared folk culture, where creative expression is the property of the community at large, and can be shared for everyone's benefit. Digital technology may be a route that reconnects us to aspects of our tribal roots. As new as these techniques are, however, they retain a continuity with pre-digital compositional approaches. The network simply allows musicians to perform together online, replicating the experience they have always had when jamming in the same room. At the same time, the mixing of distinct aural elements certainly does not require digital technology; analog sound mixing dates at least to John Cage's 1939 performance of Imaginary Landscapes, which featured a mix of turntables and radios. From this perspective, computer networks simply contribute to long standing tendencies in composition that preceded the digital era. However, some composers are exploring a wholly original, uncharted musical terrain, one that is unthinkable without networked computers. In these works, the sound experience is created through the real time participation of the listener in the making of the performance itself. These online sound art pieces rely on the interactive engagement of the listener, who helps to shape the specifics of the performance through her choices and actions, which are communicated to the music making software over the wired network. In this way, the traditional distinction between "artist" and "audience" begins to melt away, as the "listener" also becomes a "performer." [Editor's note: End, Part 1. Part 2 will appear in next week's digest] + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 7. Date: 9.25.02 From: matthew fuller (matt@axia.demon.co.uk) Subject: simon pope- art for networks The following interview is carried out in connection with opening of a show 'Art for Networks' starting now at Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, Wales. (It tours afterwards.) The show includes work by: Rachel Baker, Anna Best, Heath Bunting, Adam Chodzko, Ryosuke Cohen, Jeremy Deller, Jodi, Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie, Radio Aqualia, Stephen Willats, Talkeoke, Technologies to the People. 6 Questions in search of a network 1. Matthew Fuller: In the original Art for Networks project you state that one of the motivations of the work was to discover another set of relations for art on the internet. What was argued against was the idea that network art could be categorised according to a certain chronology. This chronology slotted certain works into a history primarily on the basis of how closely they married themselves to technological developments. What was suggested instead was that there was a whole wider sense of networks that are being made and used by artists. Do you think that this statement of an alternate set of trajectories still holds true or polemically necessary? Simon Pope: The Art for Networks project was initially devised as a way of making sense of, and investigating how to move beyond, so-called 'net.art'. This definition was, as Heath Bunting (1) has said, 'a joke and a fake' anyway, but held sway in some circles. 'Net.Art' signified a technical art of the Internet or, more specifically, the Web. It was defined as a progression through clearly defined stylistic and technical phases: from an Avant Garde, through 'high period' Web-based net.art and interminable Mannerist replays, all the while waiting for the emergence of the new Avant Garde… This lame art historical approach denies wider or longer views of how artists and their work operate. The demand for a neat, linear art history becomes a real problem for anyone it implicates. As Jodi are quoted as saying "We never choose to be net.artists or not."(2) Pinned onto this restrictive and arbitrary time-line, artists have their destinies plotted for them. It was time to take Stewart Home's cue (3) and begin a process of 'self-historicising'. The exploration of more expansive definitions of 'network' is part of this, at first through interviews and presentations in 2000 and now through this exhibition. 2. MF: If the show works through various uses and creations of networks as art, were there any ways in which this focus inflected the way in which the show was curated? Can we imagine a curation for networks? SP: 'Network' isn't used here as an 'ideal concept' (4). It remains open to interpretation and ongoing enquiry by the participating artists. The network becomes a field, terrain or environment through which to operate on, in or through. Networks have been described in many ways, often at the moment where some phenomenon eludes an accepted form of classification: Landow reminds us that Foucault adopts the network when describing the means "…to link together a wide range of often contradictory taxonomies, observations, interpretations, categories, and rules of observation." (5). Jeremy Deller's work often exemplifies this, for example. Josephine Berry noted that "The term 'networks' has nearly become a cipher for saying 'everything' with the proviso that 'everything' be framed by technology" (6). Jodi's 'Wrong Browser' project continues their scrutiny of the conventions of the most popular of these technologies that link 'everything', the Web Browser. (7). Others artists are not concerned with technology as such. They investigate social networks, distributed knowledge or social protocols, for example. Together, all of the artists in this show help us speculate, with the widest possible scope, on what an art for networks might be. 3. MF: Perhaps it is useful to think about two of the modes of network that currently exist. There's the development of systems that take heterogeneous material and connect it through a unifying, reductive, measurable protocol. Another might be informatisation - that everything can be transposed into a transmissable and calculable numerical 'equivalent'. Perhaps these kinds of networking technologies are linked to the idea of a discovery of an ur-language, a code that precedes all codes. A different kind of network might be that which is deliberately non-compressible, that generates its own terms of composition as it's enacted; rather than reducing one thing to its intermediary, it focuses on inventing new connections, proximities, conjunctural leaps. SP: The unifying system forces homogeneity onto previously heterogeneous material and has plenty of historical precedents such as systematic classification in Zoology, the Dewey decimal system. Objectified matter is ordered, processed - the system aims for closure, completeness. In your second example, the subject resists classification or reduction to a cipher. For example, in organizations, there's always tension between structure - invariably hierarchical - and those who work within it. Despite the most ruthless line-management, the subject - individual or group - will find ways of subverting the structure. A common form of resistance is the 'gossip network'. Rachel Baker's 'Art of Work', for example, has previously inserted itself into this context. (8) I think Manuel De Landa's model (9) of meshworks and hierarchies is useful here and relates, (at least in my understanding of it), to the relationship between networks, hierarchies, agency and structure. Meshworks (networks) and hierarchies exist as a mixture. The meshwork formed as an aggregate of dissimilar, heterogeneous material, the hierarchy from similar, homogeneous material, forming strata. They are interdependent and can change states, one into the other. They stratify and destratify, depending on the flow of energy: meshworks form from hierarchies and vice versa. 4. MF: Perhaps too, there is a range of disjunctive connections between these two kinds of network. For example, one of the claims often made for the architecture of the internet, and which is currently under severe test, is that it's inherently decentralised, that any time a hierarchy such as a national legislature attempts to close a site down, can be worked around. It might be remarked of course that if a technology is inherently liberatory, people acting on the basis of this liberation are simply carrying out what is programmed into the machine. SP: The technologies of the Internet describe both networks and hierarchies (or aggregates and strata): hierarchical systems such as the DNS (10) that provide structure, and could be seen as a constraining, strategizing desire. The DNS produces a homogenous structure: it's a classification system that defines a number of interrelated strata. HTTP, on the other hand, might be seen as the confounding of that system through the construction of networks within that structure: they form links between nodes to produce aggregates, affinities of dissimilar material. So yes, 'liberation' is built into the system, but it relies on agency to actualize it! OWN (11) could be seen as an attempt to assert this through building ad hoc, open, wireless networks. Critical theories of Hypertext (12), have stressed that such networked technologies produce a 'decentred' subject at the point of reception; with no single centring device to provide surety, Ideology, let alone shared values, appear impossible. In Stephen Willats' work we see a struggle with this: participation's key in many of his works and is often carefully constructed to explore or develop a 'meta-language', a symbolic language shared by disparate social groups. (13) 5. MF: It seems that quite a few of the projects circulating here situate themselves right at a point where there are various kinds of feedback, or bastard combination, generated between one kind of network and another? SP: Heath Bunting's 'Courier' (14) is a good example: although efficiently coordinated online, exchange and distribution of items 'couriered' between destinations soon becomes problematized. As items pass between social networks, via a technical network, they're immediately invested with new value. Trust between networks is negotiated 'on-the-fly', each exchange subject to very close consideration. 6. MF: Some of the work here is represented by documentation of a process that's already occurred. Other parts of the show invite participation. I don't mean simply 'interaction', but an actual challenge or invitation to take part in something going on. Natalie Bookchin, in the original series of art for networks interviews suggested that art galleries and museums were good storage places for ideas and activities that had worked in the past, but that were now done with. What might be the implications or possibilities for producing a show purely of the latter sort? SP: Much of this work demands participation, often both over time and across space. For example, Nina Pope & Karen Guthrie's 'An Artist's Impression' (15) is constructed at live events at each venue throughout the tour. We see the process of building on the 'island' in response to continuing online activity by contributors. In Anna Best's commission, work shown in the gallery changes over the duration of the tour as interviews with local participants are recorded and presented at each venue. Ryosuke Cohen connects to a massive, distributed network of contributors, each of whom sends stickers or stamps to add to each iteration of 'Braincell'. We see this exhibit grow over the duration of the tour as each version is posted back to us. While most of the work is represented in the gallery in some form or another, it's often not the primary venue: Adam Chodzko's new work distributes an archive of planning information into a travellers' encampment in Kent. Suddenly there's connection and interaction between sedentary knowledge and a potentially nomadic culture. Also, Rachel Baker's commission, extending the prototype of 'Platfrom' (16) unfolds a narrative for passengers travelling on the Eurostar. Radioqualia reminds us of the networks of open collaboration that contribute to the development of Free Software, with 'Free Radio Linux' , an "audio distribution of the Linux Kernel" (17). Beginning this tour from an independent venue has meant that there's no compulsion to seek authority, fixity add or to the canon - this can be erased and re-written if necessary. For example. Technology To The People's website (18) is entirely 'open' to encourage participation in the development of this exhibition, over time and across geographical location. >From a curator's point-of-view, this ability to describe a 'network' to link across temporal and spatial divides (19) provides a way around the restrictions of the 'net.art' taxonomy and linear art historical view. Of course, this approach isn't restricted solely to curating 'networked' art. Notes: 1. Snap to Grid, Peter Lunenfeld, 2001. p 2. Interview with Jodi, Tilman Baumgaertel, 2001 (<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.rhizome.org/object.rhiz?2550">http://www.rhizome.org/object.rhiz?2550</a>) 3. Five Thousand Years of Foreplay: Stewart Home interviewed by Marko Pyhtil (<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/pyhtil.htm">http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/pyhtil.htm</a>) 4. Southern Oscillation Index, McKenzie Wark. Online, 1998 (<a rel="nofollow" href="http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9810/msg00099.html">http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9810/msg00099.html</a>) 5. The Nonlinear Model of the Network in Current Critical Theory. George P. Landow, 1992 (<a rel="nofollow" href="http://65.107.211.206/cpace/ht/jhup/network.html">http://65.107.211.206/cpace/ht/jhup/network.html</a>) 6. The Unbearable Connectedness of Everything, Josephine Berry. Online, 1999 (<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.heise.de/tp/english/inhalt/sa/3433/1.html">http://www.heise.de/tp/english/inhalt/sa/3433/1.html</a>) 7. Baumgaertel,, Ibid. 8. Art of Work, Rachel Baker (<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.art-of-work.com/guide.html">http://www.art-of-work.com/guide.html</a> ) 9. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, Manuel de Landa. Zone Books, 1997. 10. The Domain Name System: A Non-Technical Explanation - Why Universal Resolvability Is Important, InterNIC, 2002 (<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.internic.net/faqs/authoritative-dns.html">http://www.internic.net/faqs/authoritative-dns.html</a>) 11. OWN, James Stevens & Julian Priest. (<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.informal.org.uk/inf/article.php?sid=11">http://www.informal.org.uk/inf/article.php?sid=11</a>) 12. The Network in Marxist Theory, George P. Landow. Online 1992 (<a rel="nofollow" href="http://65.107.211.206/cpace/ht/jhup/marxnet.html">http://65.107.211.206/cpace/ht/jhup/marxnet.html</a>) 13. Art and Social Function, Stephen Willats, Ellipsis (London), 2000 14. Irational Courier, Heath Bunting. Online, 2000 (<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.irational.org/cgi-bin/courier/courier.pl">http://www.irational.org/cgi-bin/courier/courier.pl</a>) 15. An Artist's Impression, Nina Pope & Karen Guthrie. Online 1998 onwards (<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.somewhere.org.uk/artists/impress/index.htm">http://www.somewhere.org.uk/artists/impress/index.htm</a>) 16. 'Platfrom' prototype supported by Proboscis. Online, 2002. (<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.platfrom.net/">http://www.platfrom.net/</a>) 17. Free Radio Linux, Radioqualia. Online, 2002 (<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.radioqualia.net/freeradiolinux">http://www.radioqualia.net/freeradiolinux</a>) 18. Art for Networks website, Technologies to the People. Online, 2002- (<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.artfornetworks.org">http://www.artfornetworks.org</a>) 19. Landow, Ibid. A number of original interviews, conducted for BBC Arts Online in 2000, can be found at <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/digital/interviews/index.shtml">http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/digital/interviews/index.shtml</a> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Rhizome.org is a 501©(3) nonprofit organization. If you value this free publication, please consider making a contribution within your means at <a rel="nofollow" href="http://rhizome.org/support">http://rhizome.org/support</a>. Checks and money orders may be sent to Rhizome.org, 115 Mercer Street, New York, NY 10012. Contributions are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law and are gratefully acknowledged at <a rel="nofollow" href="http://rhizome.org/info/10.php">http://rhizome.org/info/10.php</a>. Our financial statement is available upon request. Rhizome Digest is supported by grants from The Charles Engelhard Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Rhizome Digest is filtered by Rachel Greene (rachel@rhizome.org). ISSN: 1525-9110. Volume 7, number 40. Article submissions to list@rhizome.org are encouraged. Submissions should relate to the theme of new media art and be less than 1500 words. For information on advertising in Rhizome Digest, please contact info@rhizome.org. To unsubscribe from this list, visit <a rel="nofollow" href="http://rhizome.org/subscribe">http://rhizome.org/subscribe</a>. 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